Posts tagged decline

If you noticed a little more elbow room while you were at the movies last year, it probably wasn't the result of recliner chairs at your cineplex. As The Hollywood Reporter tells it, only about 1.26 billion folks bought movie tickets between New Year's Day and New Year's Eve in 2014 -- the lowest ...

Since the beginning of this year, Age of Empires Online has shifted into stagnation and decline -- and done so intentionally. So why did Microsoft Studios decide to all but abandon the future of this game? In short, the title launched with far too little content, a bad business model, and couldn't ...

Number-crunching services SuperData Research and Newzoo released reports today forecasting strong growth in the MMO industry. According to the analysts, worldwide spending on MMOs will top $12 billion this year, and that's not all: The companies also predict that this number will increase to a wh...

Finland might be the spiritual home of the SMS, but it also proves that this ancient form of communication is going the way of the rune stone. A mere 8.5 million texts were sent over the country's Sonera network on Christmas Eve, versus 10.9 million on that festive day in 2010. The same trend was...

It's the word on the street these days: World of Warcraft is no longer quite the king that it used to be. The massive title has lost around one million subscribers over the past year, even with Cataclysm releasing last December. Gamasutra sat down with Blizzard for a frank talk about why the titl...

Although foreshadowed, it's hard to believe that the once mighty Ninty, a company with unshakable profits even during last year's global economic downturn, just recorded a Q1 net loss of ¥25.22 billion ($288 million) compared to a net profit of ¥42.32 billion during the same 3-month period ...

Slip on your fine silk smoking jacket and light up a victory cigar US Android fans, the latest comScore numbers are out for the three-month period ending in May 2010. The most notable trend spotted was a 4 point (up from 9.0) quarterly increase in Google's Android market share as all other smartpho...

Nintendo's 2009 financial results have just been released and, shockingly enough, the company hasn't been able to break its profit record yet again. In fact, annual net profit dipped -- for the first time in six tenths of a decade -- to $2.44 billion, a 12 percent drop from the previous fiscal year...

Following a round of layoffs, a delay for one of its most anticipated titles and continuing reports of the player decline of Age of Conan, we knew that Norwegian developer Funcom wasn't in the best shape. Earlier today, the company posted its Q3 financial results and confirmed our suspicions: The c...

Konami courteously warned its investors last week that the first half of this fiscal year had been ... unfavorable to the company. It forecasted a year-over-year decline in net income of 82%, falling from ¥12 billion ($132 million) in the first half of FY 2009 to ¥2 billion ($24 million) in...

Here's a brief summary of the financial figures featured in Sony's Q1 sales report: Everything went down. The company sold 1.1 million PlayStation 3 units and 1.3 million PSP units during this year's first quarter -- a sheer drop from Q1 2008, where the company moved 1.6 million and 3.7 million un...

Despite the fact that the PS2 saw a sizable price cut just three months ago, Michael Pachter is claiming that the system is nearing the point of complete insignificance. In Wedbush's "2009 Interactive Industry Report," Pachter explains that he expects "PS2 software sales to decline sufficiently (a...

As frequently predicted, Blu-ray hasn't been enough to make up for sagging DVD sales, as a new Screen Digest report indicates a 4.8 percent slide worldwide last year, falling more than $2.6 billion. After plateauing approaching 2007, disc sales have been falling ever since and even Blu-ray's $482 ...

Don't look now, but Apple's slow market share incline may have just turned into a slow decline. Not only does a new report by research and advisory company Gartner, Inc say that Apple's market share in the US slipped just a little bit over the past year (from 7.5), but that as you can see above, t...

Players and pundits alike have been pointing to NPD figures as an indicator that PC gaming is in a decline compared to console sales. However, as pointed out by Randy Stude, PC Gaming Alliance president and Intel gaming program director in a recent interview, these figures ignored MMO subscription s...

Remember this pic? Speaking of disappearing players, that seems to be the trend in EA Sports titles. Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel points out that EA Sports titles are trending down in sales, with juggernaut Madden '08 selling 100,000 less copies this year (5% drop) and NCAA Football '08 seei...

Wil Wheaton (yes, that kid from Star Trek) has a touching column on the slow death of the arcade over at Suicide Girls, of all places (page is safe for work, but links to NSFW content). Wheaton lays out some interesting historical analysis on what actually caused the game center's slow decline (endl...

When Sony released their fiscal Q3 (Oct. - Dec. '06) financial results recently, most of the focus was on the PS3 and how the costs of its launch contributed to a massive loss for Sony's games unit. But, as the UK's Pocket Gamer points out, a massive slowdown in PSP shipments worldwide is probably j...